Other

By Elizabeth Woyke

Circulation..........3,000Date of Birth..........January 2003Frequency..........Three times a yearPrice..........$5Natural Habitat..........In an San Francisco cafe, stacked next to fliers for an Ani DiFranco show.

THE first time I encountered checkboxes
on a standardized test, I hesitated.
There were four options: white, black,
Asian or other. As a Korean adoptee with
Caucasian parents, I was sure I wasn’t black
but wavered between the other three choices.
When I consulted my teacher, she told me I
was Asian. I was a conformist kid, and I dutifully
checked the box.

Years later, I’m still no raging radical and
look back on the experience as more annoying
than traumatic. But my quiet distaste
for checkboxes endures. So, when I bought
Other, I had high hopes it would rouse my
inner dissident. Seduced by its cover lines
and Rock-the-Vote-like logo, complete with
checkbox and check mark, I thought Other
might be the perfect pop-culture and politics
magazine for people like me, who don’t
fit neatly into categories.

Other certainly tries hard to be the kind of
edgy magazine appropriate for its “outcast”
readers. It has the right pedigree, headquartered
on Castro Street, in San Francisco’s famed
gay district. A nonprofit, it receives much of
its funding from the Institute for Unpopular
Culture, a San Francisco-based arts foundation
with the tongue-in-cheek acronym IFUC. The
few ads that Other runs are decidedly nonmainstream,
including independent book
presses, underground music stores and the
Bisexual Resource Center.

Its leadership is equally unconventional. The
magazine’s publisher, Charlie Anders, is transgender,
a cross-dresser who wears a candy-red
slip dress in her staff photo. Other’s editor,
Annalee Newitz, is a bespectacled, bisexual
media nerd who also works for San Francisco’s
alt-weekly, The Bay Guardian. Both were fixtures
in the city’s alternative scene when they
founded Other in 2002. “Our original idea was
a general interest magazine that would speak
to people who weren’t represented by the
mainstream media,” said Anders. “Like a New
Yorker for freaks.”

Parts of Other are more aggressively subversive
than others. The magazine follows a
conventional layout, organizing its mix of
journalism, fiction, poetry, cartoons and original
art in a way similar to most magazines.
In the February 2004 issue, topics range from
the politics of marijuana legalization to punk
rock to B-list celebrities such as Brittany
Murphy. Though these subjects can be found
in numerous magazines, Other gives them a
decidedly different treatment, with all the
writers speaking from the perspective of outsiders.
Often, they insert themselves into
their stories and explain how their subjects
reacted to their otherness. It’s a voyeuristic
and occasionally hilarious approach.

Take, for example, Other’s interview with
Ed Rosenthal, a famous marijuana-legalization
activist. Representing Other is Lynnee
Breedlove, a San Francisco-based queer
activist and punk rocker. Breedlove is equal
parts enthusiasm and incompetence. She
repeatedly wrestles the spotlight away from
Rosenthal to talk at length about her own
drug use, sexual history and politics. The
result is an interview that conspicuously
defies traditional categories, both in style
and content.

Similarly, the writer of the Brittany Murphy
interview, which takes place at a press junket
promoting Murphy’s movie “Uptown Girls,”
focuses on Murphy’s dramatic weight loss and
the “dry humping” abilities of her male costars.
The piece ends up being about the
writer, a self-described “unemployed manicdepressive
loser.”

These two articles are the most amusing,
but self-deprecating humor runs throughout
the magazine. The editors indulge in word
play, too, cranking out titillating headlines
full of double entendres. A fiction piece about
a man farting at a municipal hearing is called
“New World Odor.” The editors’ note is headlined,
“She’s Got Balls.” While the phrase
ostensibly refers to the chorus of an AC/DC
song, invoked to celebrate strong, feisty
women, the editors take the joke one step further.
Other, they claim, is just like a woman
with balls: “… all [our] articles and art and
design and poetry and comics, are kind of like
a woman demonstrating she’s tough by lifting
her lacy panties and showing off a pair of
lovely, girly testicles.”

At times I wished the arguments in Other
were less flip and more thought-out. A few
pieces tested my type-A personality to the
limit, such as a comic strip called “Walking
George Potato!” in which a tater tot and a
chickpea ride a pogo stick through twenty-nine
frames sans dialogue. Don’t even get me started
on the pictogram “Organized Crime in Canada,
2003,” which, as far as I could tell, was a spoof
on the Canadian equivalent to the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.

So, I felt slightly disgruntled at the end of
the February issue, cheered only by the nine
pieces of art featuring naked or half-naked people.
Other’s bold covers had led me to believe
we were going to go out and attack the status
quo. I was expecting a full-on revolution.
However, with the exception of a piece by
Anders, “The Boundary Police,” that rails
against people who impose labels on others, it
failed to take a stand. “The bottom line is that
we’re trying to be fun and playful, to be readable
and not preach too much,” Anders said.
“We know we’re not Pravda.”

Indeed, Other is nothing like a Bolshevik
newspaper, although its quirky, low-budget
design may conjure up visions of one. The $5
cover price doesn’t buy much color or gloss—
Other is black-and-white except for its cover,
with no hint of shine. At forty-eight pages,
measuring eight-by-ten inches, it’s shorter in
height and length than most magazines.
However, graphics adorn nearly every page,
imparting a sense of added value. The magazine
is incredibly sturdy, with a cardboard
cover that gives it a book-like feel. Subscribers
no doubt appreciate the craftsmanship, since
they have to wait four months between issues
on Other’s current thrice-yearly schedule.

The most revolutionary part of Other may
ultimately not be its content, but the way in
which it creates a community. It brings together people who wouldn’t necessarily mix
with each other, such as libertarians, biracial
people and drag queens. Outside the confines
of the print version of the magazine, readers
can interact in online forums, in the Other
Weblog and at Anders’ bicoastal spoken word
variety show, “Writers with Drinks.”

In spirit, Other is closer to a sit-in than an
uprising. There’s certainly room for growth—
the publication is barely a year old—and its
mission of being “pro-queer, pro-feminist, proworker
rights, anti-corporate, anti-racism, and
anti-globalization” is huge. It fills a void
between Bitch and Punk Planet. It just needs
to become more effective in dealing with the
wide world it covers. Anders says that in the
next year she plans to speed up the magazine’s
production schedule, attract more advertisers
and increase the page count. All of this would
help. I just hope that she keeps using headlines
like “Uterus Shopping on Ebay.”